Australia: A Moving Carpet

"There are millions of them!" gasped a
policeman in rural Ouyen, deep in Australia's richest grain and grazing
country. "You can't drive at more than 20 miles an hour, because if you
had to brake, you'd skid and turn over. There are that many of them on
the road." Not only on the roads but in wheat paddocks, barns and
pantries across huge stretches of Victoria and New South Wales, hordes
of field mice now form what one farmer calls "a moving carpet." The
rampaging rodents, product of a rare combination of a big wheat surplus
and optimum ground temperatures...